Annamae and her mother got called in, both of them together, for a conference with Mrs. Altschuler. They sat in the classroom with its bleach-smelling linoleum floor and its buzzing fluorescent lights and its poster that was supposed to make middle-school students think English was cool because it showed William Shakespeare wearing a pair of sunglasses over the caption I invented swag, and the space that was normally utterly ordinary to Annamae was made exotic by the absence of kids and the fact of her mother sitting in a chair with a hinged arm desk. She felt like they were in a play.
Mrs. Altschuler came around to sit in front of her desk, her back to the wall of windows. The windows were divided into an astonishing number of panes. Sixty, to be exact. Annamae had counted them many times. Outside each of the sixty panes, snow was coming down.
Annamae thought, Wouldn’t it be funny if one of the sixty panes had no snow coming down? Like a rip in the scenery, letting you glimpse backstage. Letting you know this was just a play. All of a sudden she remembered a thing from when she was little, one time when she’d tried to ask her mother about a realer world beyond this one. This memory had something to do with a windowpane, too. A windowpane showing her reflection, and something else? Her reflection doubled. A vision of her but not-her on the other side of the glass.
Mrs. Altschuler opened the file folder that contained the benchmarks and assignments for the third quarter, and then she opened the file folder that had Annamae’s name printed on a little sticky label on the tab and showed how it held nothing but air. “Even if she were to hand in a little of the work, so I could give her partial credit?” the teacher was saying. With her old-timey accent, the word little got broken in two pieces, like a saltine. She didn’t pronounce the t sound at all. Annamae envisioned it, the letter t, crumbled into cracker dust.
“What do you think about that?” asked her mother. “Annamae?”
“Sorry—what?”
Her mother sighed. Breathing out, I release any tension.
Mrs. Altschuler tapped her eraser on the form that listed the benchmarks. She moistened her coral lips, something she did about a hundred times a day. She had a way of doing it—her tongue poking straight out—that made it look like she was getting ready to blow a bubble. “Annamae. Mom has taken off work to be here today.”
“I know.” It actually wasn’t true. Her mother didn’t go to the language lab on Wednesdays. Pretending was easier than explaining, but it made her feel even more that they were actors in a play, speaking their lines, going through their artificial motions.
She studied the sixty windowpanes. If only one of them had blue sky instead of snow. Blue sky with little white butterflies. She’d point it out to her mother and Mrs. Altschuler: See? There’s a hole in the backdrop. There really is another world beyond this one. They’d look and gasp and clutch their throats. Oh Annamae, you were right. Now we understand what you’ve been trying to say all along. You really are a very special girl.
“So,” Mrs. Altschuler was saying. “We can all come up with a plan for you to get your work done. Agreed?”
What could Annamae do but drift away? Float out of her body toward the windows with their dozens of panes, pass through them into the ether full of tinky little snowflakes swirling around like Escher animals eating one another’s tails, soar beyond them into the seen and unseen city. Fly above the streets burdened with lumbering buses and trucks and cars. Notice everything. Phlegm spat on sidewalks, men in stilettos and long fur coats, halal stands, yellow-eyed fish on beds of ice, scraggly trees inside wrought-iron wickets, uniformed school girls with gold hoop earrings, figures sleeping on cardboard, old women wheeling their laundry and lapdogs in folding shopping carts.
It wasn’t that she didn’t love this world.
“Annamae.”
“What?”
It was that she knew it wasn’t everything.
Maybe Mrs. Altschuler had the same app as her mother. Now she seemed to be breathing mindfully, too.
“Sorry,” said Annamae.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have been born a person.